How a Bunch of Hippies Saved South America’s Yosemite
- Matthieu Amaré
- 3 hours ago
- 7 min read
In the Cochamó Valley, in southern Chile, a small group of climbers and local residents spent 20 years fighting dams, roads, and hotel projects. In December 2025, they finalized the purchase of 803,000 acres of wild Patagonia for $63 million. This is the story of how it happened.
It rains a lot in Cochamó. Rodrigo Condeza has known that since the first time he set foot in this valley in southern Chile more than 20 years ago. But the rain hardly matters next to what nature gave the place. Among a hundred other things: granite, forest, and 3,000-year-old alerces, South American conifers, that have never seen a parking lot.
“I think that is the most beautiful place on earth,” he says over Zoom from his new home near a lake inside a Chilean nature reserve. He has been saying that for 20 years. At 52, he still says it with the tone of a man who has long since stopped apologizing for it.
A River Runs Through It
Cochamó Valley is often compared to Yosemite. It has the big walls, the meadows, the waterfalls, the river winding between pockets of dense forest. “I think it was Lonely Planet that, back in the ’90s, started talking about the ‘Yosemite of South America’,” Rodrigo says.
He has always pushed back on the comparison, or at least on what people tend to do with it.
“It’s having Yosemite 100 years ago. I will say that yeah, this is a really spectacular place like Yosemite, but what we want to do is a kind of the opposite.”
For climbers, the valley is only reachable on foot, after a five-hour hike under a 45-pound pack, or on horseback with the help of arrieros, local horsemen who carry people and gear into the valley. Once there, the walls rise for hundreds of meters. The cracks are long, clean, and splitter — the kind of straight, continuous crack systems climbers dream about — cut into some of the cleanest granite on earth.
The first climbers to put up routes there in the 1990s had to hack their way through the jungle before they could even touch the rock. Even today, topos — hand-drawn route maps and notes — still circulate folded inside glass jars left at the base of climbs for the next party. The place has its rituals.
It also has its guardians.
“For Rodrigo Condeza, loving a place is not enough to protect it. You have to be ready to fight”
Rodrigo Condeza, leader of the campaign to preserve Cochamó
In 2003, Rodrigo Condeza left Puerto Montt, a large port city in southern Chile about 60 miles from Cochamó, and moved to the valley with his family. A trained mountain guide, he started a company offering trekking, sea kayaking, and horseback trips. He bought 10 acres deep in the valley, even farther in than La Junta, the heart of the climbing area. A stream crossed his land. Naturally, he applied for the water rights.
They were denied.
And the answer caught him off guard. “They told me the stream had already been planned,” Rodrigo says. Meaning: it belonged to someone else. When the new landowner started digging, he got a shock. Following the water and how it was supposed to be used, he discovered a massive project: seven hydroelectric plants built in a chain, miles of high-voltage power lines to supply copper mines, all connected to industrial energy networks less than 60 miles away.
“When you go to Cochamó, it feels really remote, because it’s a remote place. No road, no anything. We are 100 kilometers from Puerto Montt, which is a big city, and from there you can connect with power lines to the mining, to the big cities, to the capital, to all these industries. The industry of forestry is pretty close also to where we are. So that’s why it has been so much pressure into this wild territory, because we’re really close.”
After that discovery, Rodrigo could not pretend he had not seen it.
“When something is not fair, a different energy is inside of me. So then I can recognize that. Myself, this quiet guy that likes to talk a lot and friendly, he becomes a fighter. And it’s irrational. It’s irrational. So I will do everything that needs to be done.”
Paradise for Sale
Rodrigo Condeza soon met Daniel Seeliger, an American climber who had been living in the valley since 2004 with his wife, Silvina, and who had opened the first campground in La Junta. Together, with neighbors, local tourism operators, and landowners, they founded an NGO, the first of four that would emerge over the years.
The fight began to take shape.
Locals held roughly 50 meetings with elected officials, associations, and regional tourism offices. Every presentation ended with the same final slide: an image of Cochamó Valley dried out, with a sign planted at a crossroads. “Which path do we choose? Tourism or hydropower? Yosemite or Hetch Hetchy?” Hetch Hetchy, a valley inside Yosemite, was flooded to supply San Francisco with water and became a symbol of wild places sacrificed in the name of development. When the legal routes ran out, Rodrigo and his allies went as far as buying six mining concessions at $1,200 each to physically block potential dam sites.
“An incomparable piece of environmental art to be treasured just as a Picasso or Monet painting would be”
The description of Cochamó in the Christie's auction catalog
After three years of fighting, in 2009, Chile’s president at the time, Michelle Bachelet, declared the Cochamó watershed the country’s first hydrological reserve. The hydroelectric project was dead.
“When I knew the decree was real, I cried.”
The victory was real. It was also temporary. Since 2007, an investor named Roberto Hagemann had been quietly buying pieces of the valley, parcel by parcel. He had made his fortune in mining and real estate. He saw in the land a rare opportunity: assembling, in one contiguous property, a patchwork of parcels scattered among more than 200 families, a deal so complex that no one else had wanted to attempt it.
Hagemann spent 15 years of his life on it.
Once the property was consolidated, his plan was to build roads into the valley, hotels by the lake, and gondolas for an international clientele willing to pay top dollar to see Patagonia from a café terrace.
Rodrigo and his partners opposed each new attempt. Puelo Patagonia, another NGO the guide founded with friends in 2013, eventually defeated Hagemann before Chile’s Supreme Court in 2017. Blocked at every turn, unable to secure the necessary permits, Hagemann changed tactics. And the pivot was wild.
In 2018, he hired Christie’s, the famous auction house, to sell the property for $150 million.
In Christie’s catalog, the property sat between a seaside villa and an English manor. Cochamó Valley was described as “An incomparable piece of environmental art to be treasured just as a Picasso or Monet painting would be.”
No buyer came forward, but the listing traveled around the world. It landed in conservationists’ inboxes, in conversations among climbers who knew the valley, and in the newsletters of philanthropic foundations.
In 2022, after securing the final titles for the entire property, Hagemann found himself in a strange position. He legally owned 803,000 acres. But he could not develop them, and he could not find a buyer at the price he wanted.
Rodrigo saw an opening.
The idea was simple, and almost absurd: what if they bought it themselves?
Hippies, The New York Times, and a Catfight
Contacting Hagemann after 10 years of conflict was a risky bet. A lawyer arranged the first meeting. By Rodrigo Condeza’s own account, the first two meetings were “a cat fight.” Then, slowly, something shifted.
Hagemann was stuck. He owned a place he could neither develop nor sell for the price he expected. Puelo Patagonia needed the land protected by a seller willing to negotiate, rather than see it fall into the hands of a stranger.
“Deep down in our souls, we both knew we needed each other,” Rodrigo says. Hagemann’s son, a climber who knew the walls of Cochamó well, reportedly also encouraged his father to sell to the conservationists.
“The New York Times made this article and said, you know, a bunch of hippies bought the Chilean Yosemite. And it was kind of true. We are workers, professionals, but we had no business doing this”
Rodrigo Condeza, leader of the campaign to preserve Cochamó
The NGO offered $50 million. Hagemann wanted $100 million. They negotiated for a year. The final agreement landed at $63 million. There is something uncomfortable about the idea that the only way to remove a wild place from the logic of the market is to pay full price for it, using the very tools that threatened to exploit it. Rodrigo knows that.
“The New York Times made this article and said, you know, a bunch of hippies bought the Chilean Yosemite. And it was kind of true. We are workers, professionals, but we had no business doing this.”
What they did have was nerve.
Because when the “hippies” signed, they did not have the money. What followed was part word of mouth, part relentless work. The Freyja Foundation, the Wyss Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and Patagonia joined the coalition, named Conserva Pucheguín.
“It’s like, you know, the wolf — when you make a call, more wolves will come. I think it’s something like that. We made a call and after one and a half year we had the money.”
The transaction closed in December 2025. The property is now in the hands of NGOs.
After traveling the world to close the funding gap, Rodrigo Condeza is not planning to rest. He has another plan: place 80 percent of the protected territory under national park status, with the remaining 20 percent managed by the local community.
Because even after a historic victory, he is not fooling himself. Chile spends $2 per hectare on its national parks, compared with $30 in Costa Rica and $50 in the United States. And the rise of the radical right in Chilean politics — José Antonio Kast, a far-right figure, won Chile’s presidential election in December 2025 — is a reminder that conservation victories are never permanently carved in stone.
For Rodrigo, legal protection alone cannot carry the whole burden.
“It’s not enough to have a land under a national park, under the government. It’s not enough. It’s something that we are learning in this moment of the history of humans.”
For Rodrigo Condeza, loving a place is not enough to protect it. You have to be ready to fight.
He started climbing again in Cochamó two years ago. His children, now 13 and 15, pulled him back onto the rock. Since returning to climbing, he says he understands again, “in his body,” what the valley does to the people who arrive there, and why some of them never leave quite the same.
Now that the place belongs to the people of the valley, the guide can let himself hold on to one dream: that a hundred years from now, future generations will still see rain falling on a lush wild valley, not on parking lots.
